Today we were greeted with 2 boxes of Legos and split into 2 teams. Our assignment was to build a city. The construction was split into 3 phases with a 7 minute production time. We used a scrum board to break up the tasks and assign levels of importance.
When you have a group of people working towards the same goal, amazing things happen. When communication is poor, amazing things happen as well but probably not what you wanted. Good communication skills are an important asset to a project manager. It’s also important to have the ability to assess the strengths of the team and delegate tasks accordingly.
As the project manager, you are dealing with so many personalities that inevitably they will disagree on certain aspects of the project. What do you do when they debate recommendations, timelines, resources, and each other. Or they disagree so often that the upcoming milestone/deadline is potentially impacted? This would probably be a good time to remind the team of their end goal then remind each team member of their particular strengths and tasks.
You may be Project Manager of a team that includes your arch nemesis or just someone you have bad history with. What to do? Hopefully they’re not crazy and try to sabotage the whole project, this is rarely the case thank goodness. So the best thing to do is to put personal feelings to the side and focus on the project. It takes precedence over everything and is after all what butters your bread.